2000-06-20
Dear Diary:

Do you ever wonder what the whales are singing?

Grocery lists? Lullabies? A long list of begats? The story of their travels?

I have no idea why whales fascinate me as they do. Paul played me the first whale song I ever heard. It was one of those funny, paper thin bits of vinyl you got occasionally in old National Geographics. 'Member those flimsy 45's that contained sounds that went with a story in the magazine. 'Member?

Even through the inevitable pops and clicks of a shoddy recording played on a cheap turntable, the eeriness of the whale song came through loud and clear.

People singing the world and their place in it into being.  An exotic idea, don't you think?. I just finished re-reading Bruce Chatwin's book, Songlines, and it's got me thinking about whales again. Except this isn't a book about whales at all, it's about Australia's aboriginal people and their songlines.

If I understood Chatwin rightly, songlines are routes that start mostly in the north and northwest of Australia and travel southwards through the country. They are both a creation myth and a roadmap across the country, Aboriginals singing the travels of the ancestors such as the Lizard, the Kangaroo, the story of how the country came to be.

Chatwin said there are about 200 Aboriginal languages in Australia and most tribes know the languages of their immediate neighbours but not languages beyond that.

Yet, they will recognize their songline, the song of their particular ancestor, even when it's sung in another language and describes country 1,000 miles away, country where they've never been. After a few bars, they can sing the song in their own language, although this is a song that maps out trails that can be more than 1,000 miles long.

I am not explaining this well, I know it. Let me hand it over to Chatwin, who was talking about it with his guide, Arkady:

"Certain phrases, certain combinations of musical notes, are thought to describe the action of the Ancestor's feet. One phrase would say, 'Salt pan'; another 'Creek-bed' ... An expert song-man, by listening to their order of succession, would count how many times his hero crossed a river, or scaled a ridge -- and be able to calculate where, and how far along, a Songline he was.

"'He'd be able', said Arkady 'to hear a few bars and say, "this is Middle Bore" or "That is Oodnadatta"-- where the Ancestor did X or Y or Z.'"

"'So a musical phrase', I said 'is a map reference?'"

"'Music', said Arkady, 'is a memory bank for finding one's way around the world.'"

Chatwin speculates, because the songlines begin in the north of the country, that perhaps at one time there were even songlines that went back along the Aboriginal's original migration routes into Australia.

He wonders if song was our species' first formal way of marking our place in the world, if back in some savannah in Africa our most distant humanoid ancestors said the first "I am" in music.

Whales are our distant cousins, they're mammals as are we. They live in water as did the larger We, the first vertebrates, the primordial "back befores" of us, our ancestors in the largest sense.

Do you ever wonder what the whales are singing?

--Marn

Old Drivel - New Drivel


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This template is a riff on a design by the truly talented Quinn. Because I'm a html 'tard, I got alot of pity coding to modify it from Ms. Kittay, a woman who can make html roll over, beg, and bring her her slippers. The logo goodness comes from the God of Graphics, the Fuhrer of Fonts, the one, the only El Presidente. I smooch you all. The background image is part of a painting called Higher Calling by Carter Goodrich which graced the cover of the Aug. 3, 1998 issue of The New Yorker Magazine.

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